All posts by: Drew Shields

In my last post, I described the FIX solution provided by TT as “FIX-as-a-service” (FaaS). Indeed, one of the differentiators of TT is that it is a suite of professional trading services delivered using the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model: services that are available from anywhere, on demand, without the need for any pre-allocation of infrastructure or deployment of software.

This is what makes our FIX offering compelling (along with the performance improvements we’ve made along the way), but FaaS is a launching point for two other services that separate TT from the typical “off-the-shelf” trading system: market access and compliance/data-retention.

By the time I entered capital markets more than a decade ago, FIX had already become mundane, boring. FIX is essential, but so are eating vegetables, drinking water and exercise. None of those are things I really want to do, and they certainly aren’t worth blogging about.

But for the first time in my career, I’m actually excited to talk about FIX. By leveraging the hybrid architecture of TT®, we are putting a modern twist on the boring service of FIX, which we are calling FIX-as-a-service, or FaaS.

FIA Expo is here again, and as always, for those of us who provide solutions to the futures industry, it provides a great opportunity for assessing the past year and talking about plans for the future. This year has been one of growth and continued evolution at Trading Technologies. In the last few Expos, we were talking about where we were going with the TT® platform alongside our legacy platform, X_TRADER®, but 2016 finally gives us the opportunity to talk in terms of where we have been and the benefits users of TT see compared with other offerings in the market.

While TT and X_TRADER are not yet at feature parity, that is due in part to the fact that we have been investing in TT to build new features and functionality that have never been available in X_TRADER while also investing heavily in the performance and flexibility it offers in terms of automated trading.

Trading Technologies has spent the last few years working on the next-generation TT® platform. Through the process, we’ve learned a lot about what makes a good team and how a product needs to challenge the status quo if to make a long-term impact.

It’s fair to say that any great accomplishment has as its first ingredient the people themselves. This is absolutely the case at TT, and growing our team over the last two years has been one of our major focuses. When I think about the type of people we’re looking to add, the most important question I have about any individual is: are they hungry?